Politics and more

Wall Street Leading Washington Yet Again: What Was Obama Thinking?

 If you want to understand what makes Elizabeth Warren so special in American poli-tics, consider her nervy leadership of the campaign to block President Obama's foolish nomination of one Antonio Weiss to be the top Treasury official in charge of the do-mestic financial system, including enforcement of the Dodd-Frank Act. For most of his Wall Street career, Weiss has epitomized everything that reeks about financial abuses. As chief of international mergers and acquisitions for Lazard, Weiss orchestrated what are delicately known as "corporate inversions," in which a domestic corporation moves its nominal headquarters offshore, to avoid its U.S. taxes. It's hard to improve on Sen. Warren's description of this play, in her Huffington Post blog of last Wednesday: 

 

Iran Nuclear Talks To Be Extended After Missing Deadline VIENNA, Nov 24 (Reuters)

 - Iran and six powers failed for a second time this year on Monday to resolve their 12-year dispute over Tehran's nuclear ambitions and gave themselves seven more months to overcome the deadlock that has prevented them from clinching an historic deal. Western officials said they were aiming to secure an agreement on the substance of a final accord by March but that more time would be needed to reach a consensus on the all-important technical details. "We have had to conclude it is not possible to get to an agreement by the deadline that was set for today and therefore we will extend the JPOA to June 30, 2015," British For-eign Secretary Philip Hammond told reporters at the end of the talks.

 

  What's Wrong With This Picture? For U.S. Fight Against ISIS, Everything WASHINGTON

 -- The Islamic Republic of Iran would like to make one thing clear: We've got this. Up until June 10, Iranian officials had been content to shape events in Iraq quietly through their hold on local Shiite militias and the prime minister at the time, Nouri al-Maliki. Then the Iraqi government lost Mosul, the nation's second-largest city, to the growing Sunni extremist force now known as the Islamic State, or ISIS. The U.S. eventually re-sponded: It forced a new government to take power, sent in airpower and military ad-visers, and launched an international effort against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. But months before the U.S. showed that it was willing to invest heavily in the region again, Iran decided the rise of ISIS gave it the chance to stop being coy about its con-trol of the Iraqi government.